Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy
Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the
Threat to White Supremacy by Sheryll Cashin
26.95
Loving beyond boundaries is a radical act that
is changing America. When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were
ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation,
punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark
decision of Loving v. Virginiaended bans on interracial marriage
and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to
describe such racism.
Drawing from the earliest chapters in US
history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s
original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched
construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited
exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea
of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by
today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of
color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good.
Cashin argues that over the course of the last
four centuries there have been “ardent integrators” and that those people are
today contributing to the emergence of a class of “culturally dexterous”
Americans. In the fifty years since the Lovings won their case, approval for
interracial marriage rose from 4 percent to 87 percent. Cashin speculates that
rising rates of interracial intimacy—including cross-racial adoption, romance,
and friendship—combined with immigration, demographic, and generational change,
will create an ascendant coalition of culturally dexterous whites and people of
color.
Loving is both a history of white supremacy and a hopeful treatise on the
future of race relations in America, challenging the notion that trickle-down
progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible
and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial
understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in
artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are
celebrated.
